Power Player

Talk it up.

We’ve all read or heard about ‘sports parents’ — more specifically those intense / helicopter sports parents. In the hockey world there are countless anecdotes that detail how some mom or dad relentlessly emailed, called, texted, or otherwise pursued a coach about their kid’s ice time, special teams opportunities, line assignment, or whatever. Extreme examples abound, and if you read enough comment boards, you might assume that parent-coach interactions are basically thought of by coaches as problematic and to be avoided.

If you’re a parent, maybe you’ve experienced the effects of that kind of thinking?

When one of my kids was maybe 11 or 12, what I’d consider to be an over-the-top intense coach told all of us parents at a post-tryout, pre-season meeting that he’d be communicating only with our kids, not with us. Say what?

Setting aside the somewhat questionable judgement behind intentionally excluding parents from a non-parent adult-minor relationship, it takes a pretty special kid to confront and self-advocate with an authority figure who has absolute power over their participation in an activity they love. And what parent who sees their child become frustrated or down about something they know that kid absolutely loves isn’t going to wonder what’s going on, and then try to fix the problem? Imagine a sixth or seventh grade teacher adopting a ‘no communicating with parents’ policy and it’s easy to understand why that approach might not go over too well with some people.

The reality is, if you’re coaching youth team sports, you’re coaching other people’s kids — which means you’re coaching parents too. In any successful relationship, communication is essential. The challenge, of course, is time.

Coaching from the couch.

Given the time constraints in most sports — but, it seems, especially in hockey — communicating meaningful information one-on-one to players happens infrequently. Communicating meaningful information one-on-one to parents happens way less than infrequently.

We created PowerPlayer to make it quick and easy for coaches to provide meaningful and helpful information privately to players, and for that information to be automatically made available to their parents. Whether you’re coaching a team for an entire season, or are working with kids in a camp or skills clinic scenario, PowerPlayer removes the time constraints around providing feedback. No need to take up valuable ice time or hang around the rink when you can effectively coach from your couch.

PowerPlayer offers coaches the ability to provide both quantitative (measurable) and qualitative (subjective) data that helps players and their parents gain a realistic understanding of personal strengths and challenges, and of their capabilities relative to an anonymized peer group such as their own team. It’s also designed to make it easy to deliver instructional or motivational feedback via comments, video, attachments like PDFs, or links.

PowerPlayer feedback doesn’t just help players improve. It shines a light into the coach-player relationship, allowing parents to actually see what’s going on between the kids they love and the adults they’ve entrusted them to. That helps build that all-important level of trust and eliminates the dreaded coach-player-parent Bermuda triangle of silence. Nothing good ever happens in there.

We created PowerPlayer because we love our kids, and we love the game. We’d love to help make playing, coaching, and parenting in youth hockey a better experience for everyone.

The numbers.

01.17.19

We’re excited about our numbers to date, because we know we can build on them. After all, that’s what long-term development is all about.

Feedback:
David Cheung Atkinson
Head Coach / Duffield Devils Peewee A

Feedback:
Éric Houde
Head Coach / Dynamiques CCL Peewee AAA

11.23.18

As a player, I would have loved to get this kind of feedback. I always wanted to be first, to be the best. But how could I know what my coach was thinking about me? Not every player is ready to ask their coach questions — some people are just shy — and I’m talking about players from minor hockey all the way to pro.

Smiles ahead.

09.15.18

Kids who are positively reinforced by the people who surround them tend to be more confident, happy, and energetic, and are much more likely to succeed than those who may have similar skill sets, but who are less emotionally secure.

Are you feeling it?

08.28.18

Anticipation is building as a new hockey season approaches. Maybe it’s the comfort of old gloves holding the promise of a new stick that does it? Maybe it’s the idea that a new season offers an opportunity to build on time-tested knowledge by applying new thinking? At PowerPlayer, we’re looking forward to the opportunity to build on what we learned in 2017-18 — our first full season offering a digital feedback platform for youth hockey.

Coach ability.

The science of positive feedback.

07.23.18

For the organizations and coaches who are adopting our platform, positivity isn’t some new age ‘everyone gets a trophy because kids want to be coddled’ concept. It’s a teaching and coaching technique rooted in science.

Your call.

Time to talk?

03.15.18

For millions of kids, parents and coaches, the season is winding down. And all over the hockey world, the thought of a standard one-on-one, end of season coach/player/parent meeting is a stress-inducing prospect for many on both sides of the table.

I think we need parents to be part of the teams we’re coaching. If parents understand what I’m seeing in their child and can help me motivate them or address something that needs to be addressed, that’s hugely beneficial to their child, to me, and to the team.

Feedback:
Jeff Indivero
Syracuse Nationals AAA

Coaching is feedback.

10.30.17

“We wouldn’t accept a teacher telling us that our child had failed a grade at the end of the year without any warning or aid in helping them succeed, so why would we allow our players to go through a season without continuous feedback?”

Loud and clear.

08.29.17

We’ve shared PowerPlayer with countless coaches, hockey directors, and parents, and we’re working with organizations from Anchorage to Philadelphia, from Syracuse to Sweden. No one has told us they think providing meaningful feedback to kids and their parents is a bad idea.

Intangibles count. So count them.

Ahead of the game.

05.04.17

Before your accountant became a professional accountant, before your dentist became a professional dentist, and before the leading scorer in the NHL became a professional hockey player, they were kids.

Group dynamics.

4.11.17

Anyone who’s ever been part of a team—either as a player or as a coach—where things have just clicked, or conversely, have never clicked at all no matter what you did, has been subject to the power of group dynamics.

Noticed or known?

Feedback:
Nick Vachon
GM / LA Jr. Kings

01.30.17

For coaches, a big part of the challenge is communicating in a meaningful way with kids and parents on a regular basis. We’ve adopted PowerPlayer as an organization because it provides opportunities for coaches to share comments, thoughts, video clips, ratings and real metrics with the players and their parents more frequently.

Newbies, knowledge, and what’s next.

12.19.16

Even though I grew up in Buffalo, where winter totally rules, my sport growing up was baseball. Sure I watched the Sabres as a casual fan, but my knowledge of hockey was limited to hating Brett Hull. Google it!

10,000 hours?

11.26.16

If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, or maybe even if you haven’t, you might be familiar with the 10,000 hour concept, which postulates that it takes that minimum number of hours of ‘deliberate practice’ to become ‘expert’ at something. Like chess, piano, ballet. Or hockey.

Feedback:
Chris Collins

Game changer.

10.21.16

A while back, I connected with a friend who’d spent part of his summer sitting in a hockey rink watching his 10 year-old run through some drills. And he was frustrated. Not because of what was happening on the ice during the camp, but because of what wasn’t happening.

Feedback:
Stan Kondrotas

Good hands.

08.01.16

We just spent a couple of weekends at The Coaches Site / TeamSnap 2016 Hockey Coaches Conferences. As sponsors, we were there to introduce PowerPlayer to the coaches in attendance, but we also learned a thing or two about the state of hockey.

Coaching is communication.

07.18.16

In 2015, a nine-year-old BC kid quit his team with two games left in the season. Seems he’d had enough of sitting on the bench game after game, crying while he watched his teammates play. Why was he denied the opportunity to play?

What gets measured gets done.

What do we know?

06.01.16

I grew up with sports. And, oh yeah, of course… school! One of those things was arguably more fun than the other, and the rewards they offered differed, but for any real chance of success, both required not just attention but commitment.